‘The first dance’ is a performance that explores the nature of human-technology relationship with the very direct and embodied experiment of human- machine dance performance. The robotic arm together with a performance artist explore and expand the boundaries of their respective disciplines by comparing the
complex nature of dance and robotics from highly mechanical ballet towards freer, improvised dance styles and from automata, kinetic sculptures to autonomous entities. By trading of technical and interpretative capacities of both performers allow them to explore gradients of roles to play and ways they interact. They meet in a creative alliance beyond binary oppositions of either human or machine primacy, natural and artificial, organic and mechanical, but based on mutual actions of teaching, learning and stimulating. The dance unfolds as their indirect interaction through spatial geometrical compositions based on continuous moves, prolonged sculptural poses and recomposed dance positions created through complementation, mimicry or its lackof and orchestrated in time with their own bodily audible accompaniment. They follow a choreography strongly built on repetitions of movement sequences and sounds in order to create a background rhythm, as well as to underline it as key factor of learning processes: perfecting the movement through or communicating to find common language between organic and digital ways to approach choreography and dance notations between robotic agent and a dancer or approaching the technology itself.
‘The first dance’ is an opening chapter of a larger project called reflecting on human-technology relationship by specifically looking at the automation processes within creative industries and artistic realm with the use of its strong symbol of robotic arm at its core.

duration:
15 min

Credits:
Concept, storyline, robotic choreography: Maria Smigielska 
Dancer: Jaira Tabita Peyer, ZHdK
video: Davide Arizzoli
video edit: Maria Smigielska

21.10.2018 Kulturfolger, Zurich
25, 26, 27.10.2018 ZHdK, Zurich